Oregonian reporter writes about Oregon's ethnic communities

Oregonian reporter Elizabeth Suh attended a recent panel discussion on the trials of racial and ethnic minorities in Oregon.

A Mexican-American professor who said he is mistaken for cleaning staff if he's not dressed up on campus.

A Japanese-American professor who ran home from her first day of school in her hometown, Hood River, to proclaim: "There's nobody at school for me to marry!"

And a black minister -- and one of the last living offspring of a slave -- who has to go into Portland to find someone to cut her hair.

At a panel addressing the role of Oregon's ethnic communities in Forest Grove last week, the speakers had frank dialogue with an audience of mostly older, white adults, some hailing from Pacific University in Forest Grove.

Alfonso Lopez-Vasquez is an assistant professor of education and assistant to the provost for diversity at Pacific University; Linda Tamura is an author and education professor at Willamette University; and Hannah Hurdle-Toomey is a minister, whose father, Andrew Jackson Hurdle, was a slave.

The accomplished, well-educated panelists shared their research into the history of slaves, Native Americans, Latinos and Japanese immigrants in Oregon, but also had surprising personal stories to tell.

Throwing in humor throughout her presentation, Hurdle-Toomey recalled how she searched for a local hair stylist after she bought her home in Forest Grove in 1983.

Barbers and beauticians were flustered by her inquiry: "I don't know how to cut your people's hair," she was told. So she drives the 26 miles into Portland.

"Do not panic," Hurdle-Toomey said satirically to the audience at the event. "I come in peace."

"Your neighborhood has not become blighted, nor your property devalued."

Tamura is a third-generation Japanese-American whose parents were born in America. But she remembers learning she was different when she entered school -- the food -- pizza, tacos, sweet rice concoctions unlike the rice she had at home -- was almost inedible at first.

Looking through textbooks, she began to wish she had blue eyes and blond hair, because that's what she saw. She learned about pioneers who crossed the Oregon Trail, but not Asian pioneers who crossed the Pacific Ocean.

When her mom told her she had been to camp, Tamura thought only of fun summer camp, only later learning her mother's camp -- an American concentration or internment camp -- had been "horrific."

In Tamura's research of Japanese-American history in Oregon, it has been painful to come across the names of friends' grandparents, even former schoolteachers, on petitions to drive out the "Japs."

She said she's realized it often takes someone from a generation removed from persecution to seek and share those stories.

The U.S. government's acknowledgement of its mistakes and payment of reparations has made it OK for Japanese-Americans to talk about what they went through, Tamura said.

On that point, Hurdle-Toomey spoke up.

She's participated in unsuccessful suits for slavery reparations, and people would tell her in court that black people should just "get over it."
The audience responded with vexation and soul-searching on how to better race relations in America.

Some ideas? Share direct accounts, such as slave narratives, that speak for themselves. And perhaps most important -- promote direct, individual relationships between people of different races.